FLAC due to the very good software support. I don't want to have to re-encode or transfer to another lossless format in the future if it can be avoided. I think FLAC (and ALAC) have the best software support currently. Strength in numbers is the reason I picked FLAC I guess. Plus its free and open unlike ALAC.

I switched from Monkey's Audio to WavPack in 2005. My main consideration is compression rate, but I was concerned by the lack of error tollerance with Monkey's. On consideration I realised that the difference of a few percent between MAC Extra High and WavPack High was negligable when considering my archive of 100-150 GB.

WavPack seemed to have decent compression rates, error tollerance, multichannel support, and I was just really impressed with the way that David reacted to users' requests.

I've said for a while that I will be interested to see the results of this poll. In the last poll WavPack received a measily 15% of the votes. I believe it will be a lot higher this time: it's basically going to be FLAC or WavPack to come top. FLAC may still take it, but WavPack will sure be close.

I was originally a Monkey's user, which offered (and still offer) excellent ratio at excellent speed. Then I was looking for formats offering a higher decoding speed: opening these files then appeared as a much more confortable process on Cool Edit/Audition (opening time could be 4 time faster between WavPack or FLAC compared to MAC -normal) and faster decoding also mean faster transcoding.

FLAC and WavPack were the fastest ones (with Shorten... unbeatable but outdated); WavPack finally had my preference, because:- the tagging system is much more conveniant for my purpose (i.e. much faster)- seeking was even better than FLAC (which is already very good)- I got better encoding ratios- I liked the red icon - David is a very nice guy (it's not a necessary condition: I also used MPC in the past ...)

Could you please tell the difference? I don't want to infirm your statement at all, I'm just curious. I've got huge Flac collection and if I could save say 2% (6 GB in my case) of space by reencoding, I will seriously consider to do it. (It must be horrible work anyway)So: what do you think? Is it worth to reencode (or transcode...) from Flac to WavPack?Thanks for response.

I used to be Monkey's Audio user because of its strong compression. However I became unsatisfied with its low decompression speed when I started regular conversions to lossy formats for my portable flash player. Also growing collection and shrinking HDD space made me think to use lossy formats for some less critical music.

Then I found WavPack. A lot faster with small compression loss (vs Monkey's) and with hybrid option. And this format is still evolving, whereas any news for Monkey are hardly possible.My spell: -b360cmx

I've got huge Flac collection and if I could save say 2% (6 GB in my case) of space by reencoding, I will seriously consider to do it. (It must be horrible work anyway)So: what do you think? Is it worth to reencode (or transcode...) from Flac to WavPack?Thanks for response.

Wait until YALAC final comes out : it's blazing fast, and has great compression ratios (just look at the YALAC threads, and at synthetic soul's posts.

Like guruboolez, I used to use Monkey's audio because it first seemed the obvious choice. Good compression speed, and high efficiency. It's probably got the highest compression speed to compression ratio of any codec.

After transcoding my collection several times, however, I decided that I should switch to FLAC because its decompression time is much much faster which outweighs the small size increase. FLAC seems to be one of the most popular and supported codecs which is a big plus (although I don't think it makes a huge amount of difference in my application).

I think that wavpack offers great advantages, like better compression and still good speed, but I don't think anything quite has as good of a balance between decompression speed and efficiency as FLAC does yet. I'd probably use WavPack in lieu of monkey's now if I needed better compression.

YALAC looks really promising too, and when finalized, I'd switch to that in a heartbeat if it doesn't have any huge disadvantages over the other codecs.

I wrote shell script for Linux to encode from one .flac with embedded cuesheet to per-track .ogg files copying common and per-track .flac comments (my own scheme compatible with foorbar 0.9 one) to the result files. The ability to decode specified track from such .flac only with command line switch is very handy for me, also common tagging format with ogg vorbis allows easy transfer of metadata.